Nobody Is Ever Missing Read online

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  In memory of MG

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

  só heavy, if he had a hundred years

  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

  Henry could not make good.

  Starts again always in Henry’s ears

  the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

  And there is another thing he has in mind

  like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

  would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

  with open eyes, he attends, blind.

  All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;

  thinking.

  But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

  end anyone and hacks her body up

  and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

  He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.

  Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

  Nobody is ever missing.

  —John Berryman, “Dream Song 29”

  1

  There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them. I think this because of what happened the week I knew I’d be leaving soon, but he didn’t know; I knew I needed to tell him this but I couldn’t imagine any possible way to get my mouth to make those words, and since my husband can unintentionally read minds, he drank a good deal more than usual that week, jars of gin mostly, but tall beers from the deli, too. He’d walk in sipping a can hidden in a paper bag, smile like it was a joke.

  I would laugh.

  He would laugh.

  Inside our laughing we weren’t really laughing.

  The morning I left he got out of bed, got dressed, and left the room. I stayed cold awake under shut lids until I heard our front door close. I left the apartment at noon wearing my backpack and I felt so sick and absurd that I walked into a bar instead of the subway. I ordered a double bourbon even though I don’t usually drink like that and the bartender asked me where I was from and I said Germany for no good reason, or maybe just so he wouldn’t try to talk to me, or maybe because I needed to live in some other story for a half hour: I was a lone German woman, here to see the Statue of Liberty and the Square of Time and the Park of Central (not a woman taking a one-way flight to a country where she only knew one person, who had only once extended an offer of his guest room, which, when she thought of it again, seemed to be the kind of invitation a person extends when they know it won’t be taken but it was too late now because I was taking it and oh well oh well oh well).

  A man took the stool beside me despite a long row of empties, ordered a cranberry and nothing.

  What’s your trouble? he asked me. Tell me your trouble, baby.

  I looked back at him like I didn’t have any trouble to tell because that’s my trouble, I thought, not knowing how to tell it, and this is why my favorite thing about airport security is how you can cry the whole way through and they’ll only try to figure out whether you’ll blow up. They’ll still search you if they want to search you. They’ll still try to detect metal on you. They’ll still yell about laptops and liquids and gels and shoes, and no one will ask what’s wrong because everything is already wrong, and they won’t look twice at you because they’re only paid to look once. And for this, sometimes, some people are thankful.

  2

  They looked and made quick calculations: a 7 percent chance of con artistry, 4 percent chance of prostitution, 50 percent chance of mental instability, 20 percent chance of obnoxiousness, a 4 percent chance of violent behavior. I was probably none of these things, at least not at first, but to all the passing drivers and everyone else in this country I could be anything, so they just slowed, had a look, made a guess, kept driving.

  Women—they’d squint quick, make a worried face, continue on. Men (I later learned) stared from the farthest distance—their eyes trained to stay on me in case I was something they needed to shoot or capture—but they hardly ever stopped. Up close, I was not so promising: just a woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.

  But I didn’t know any of this at first—I just stood and waited, not knowing that wearing sunglasses would always leave me stranded, not knowing that wearing my hair down meant something I did not mean, not knowing that my posture had to be so carefully calibrated, that I should always stand like a dancer ready to leap.

  All I knew was what I’d read on that map at the airport: south until I hit Wellington, across on the ferry, then Picton, Nelson, Takaka, and Golden Bay, Werner’s farm, the address scrawled on that bit of paper that had started all this.

  When the plane landed that morning, I hadn’t slept for thirty-seven hours or so. After they’d dimmed the lights I’d kept my eyes wide, my brain cruising into an endless horizon. I didn’t read anything or watch anything on the screen inches from my face. I listened to sleeping bodies breathe; I tried to pick words out of feathery voices, rows away. The flight attendants swayed down the aisles and winked and pursed their lips and handed me very certain amounts of food substance: bread roll smooth as a lightbulb; tongue-sized piece of chicken; thirty-two peanuts in a metallic pocket. I bit into a flap of cheese, not noticing the plastic, then gave up on food.

  Outside baggage claim I watched a man smoking a cigarette and kicking something along the curb, sunlight splintering around him like a painting of a saint. This was all it was, this country I’d catapulted into.

  * * *

  Oh, how could I not stop for you? that first driver asked. How could I not?

  I don’t know, I said. How could you?

  The woman laughed but I was not in a place to see humor. I suppose it had been funny, but when I stared back at her with nothing on my face she stopped laughing. A long, curved nose gave her the regal but unflattering look of a falcon or toucan. She spoke to me like I was a ch
ild, which was fine because I wanted to be one. Lately, I couldn’t remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I’d only seen the previews to.

  You’re a brave lass, aren’t you? Don’t see many like you out on the road.

  There’s a certain kind of woman who will notice someone’s terror and call it bravery.

  I thought lots of people hitchhiked here.

  Oh, not too many, she said. Not anymore. Everywhere is dangerous these days. Would you have a pear? Help yourself to a Nashi. I have loads of ’em, a special at the grocery.

  She told me about her eleven-year-old son, an accident she’d made in her twenties, and I ate a pear with the juice going everywhere, but she was only going to Papakura, so she let me out by a petrol station not far down the highway.

  Don’t you let any blokes pick you up, you hear? If one stops, you just let him keep going. We’re always keeping an eye out, other women, you know. Another will stop for you soon enough.

  I said I would, but I knew I wouldn’t take her advice, because I can never manage to reject anyone’s offer of anything; this was one of the only things about myself of which I was certain.

  For a while there were no cars to show my thumb to, but I kept standing there, not even having an appropriate curiosity about this new country (a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not). The skin on my lips was drying and I thought about how all the cells on every body are on their way to a total lack of moisture and everyone alive has that thought all the time but almost no one says it and no one says it because they don’t really think that thought, they just have it, like they have toes, like most people have toes; and the knowledge that we’re all drying up is what presses the gas pedal in all the cars people drive away from where they are, which reminded me that I wasn’t going anywhere, and I noticed that many cars had passed but none had stopped or even slowed, and I began to wonder about what would happen if no one took me, if the first woman had been a fluke and hitchhiking had been left in the seventies with other now-dangerous things—lead paint, certain plastics, free love—and I was going to be stuck here forever, watching no cars drive by, thinking about my cells all helpless to their drying.

  I decided to try to look happy because I thought someone might be more inclined to pick up someone who was happy.

  I am happy, I told myself, I am a happy person.

  I opened my eyes more than was necessary and hoped this would convey my happiness to the cars, but they kept passing.

  One honked, as if to say, No.

  My arm stayed out for a long time and my elbow ached at the spot where they’d always taken the blood, and I became so accustomed to the passing cars that I forgot that the point of all this was for me to get into a car and go somewhere, but nothing was following anything else—one car would pass, then another, but all the cars came and went alone. And I was here. And nothing had followed me—I was a human non sequitur—senseless and misplaced, a bad joke, a joke with no place to land. The sky was a good sky color and the air was healthy feeling, and maybe this was the kind of day that reminded all those drivers that days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have. This kind of day doesn’t want you to dare it, doesn’t want you to flip a coin, doesn’t want you to pick up a stranger off the side of the road.

  But eventually that first woman was proven right—it was the women who stopped, who insisted they never picked up hitchhikers, only women with thumbs out, damsels in transportation distress—which was what the second woman said, and I thought, Sure, fine, whatever—I wasn’t going to mince words with anyone. There was no reason for that. She was on her way home from a hospital where she was a nurse, so I asked her what I had been thinking about ever since that last day at the lab:

  What do they do with the blood? After they’re done with it, I mean.

  What blood? she asked.

  When they test it. After they test it for disease or hormone levels or whatever. All those tubes of it—what happens?

  Well, they dispose of it. It is hazardous waste.

  But where does it go?

  Into a secure place. First a tube, then a hazardous-waste container, then the containers are taken away by a company. They put it somewhere safe and secure and no one ever touches it ever again.

  And that put an end to our talking. We didn’t say another thing until she let me out where she had to let me out.

  Good luck, she said, take care. And stay away from those blokes.

  3

  It became clear after some hours of waiting on the narrow, tree-lined road where the nurse had let me out that some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was; occasional cars sped around the road bend and I ended up frightening drivers the way that wild animals do when they stand stunned dumb in a road. The cars would slow or swerve or honk and I wished I could honk back—I know, I know—why am I here? It was also unclear to me. After a while a little red car made a three-point turn and pulled up beside me and he leaned over to pop open the passenger door and I got in and thought, this is exactly who they said I should stay away from and exactly what I am not staying away from, and the bloke said, Where you headed?, and I said, The ferry, and he said, Which one?

  Um, to the South Island?

  The South Island?

  Yeah?

  Well, you’re a long ways off—where you coming from?

  The airport?

  I was saying everything like a question because everything was a question.

  Yer all wop-wops, aren’t ya, all the way out here in Ness Valley?

  Someone left me here, I said, and wondered if the nurse hadn’t liked talking about work, about blood. I couldn’t remember if I had even told her where I was trying to go.

  The bloke drove me back up the hills I’d come down with the nurse, past the petrol stations, the fields of sheep, the repeated green plants, the narrow roads turning into more little roads, and what was the point of it, I wondered, of all this world, these plants, these sheep, this place?

  The most beautiful country in the world, the bloke said a few times, but I knew that lots of people tell themselves things like that but there is no country that is the most beautiful country. The bloke let me out where one road met another road. Lots of cars, he said, and there were lots of cars but none of them stopped for me. The sky went dark and this was not the kind of place where streetlights were, this was a bring-your-own-light kind of environment and I didn’t have any light, hadn’t brought any light, hadn’t thought about how I’d need light. It was the first of many things I was unprepared for.

  I saw a little shed on the edge of a field with a large hole ripped in it, so I crawled in, ran my hands along the inside looking for snakes or rats, but I just found a rusted-up hammer and a horseshoe and an empty glass bottle. It is best to sleep through the dark, I thought, so I am doing the best I can. As I fell asleep I thought that the appropriate feeling would have been fear or regret or some soup of both, but that wasn’t what I felt; I reminded myself that once I got to Werner’s farm my life would become small and manageable and wouldn’t involve sleeping in sheds or hitchhiking, so I slept like I was already the simplest woman in the world.

  The next morning I woke to an unfamiliar noise happening outside the shed and it reminded me of a familiar noise: Husband in the other room, his office, the rhythmic chalk clack, a pause, more clacking. There was something about the smell of it, the color of it, he said, that loosened up his brain, let the numbers fall out in the right order.

  I thought you hated the chalkboard, I imagined him saying to my nostalgia.

  I do, but the sound of you putting things on it makes it okay.

  My husband, smiling in the back of my brain: I remembered him this way.

  I rolled up my makeshift bed, folded the towel and T-shirt back into my pack, and climbed out of the hole to find that the unfamiliar noise was sheep swishing in the grass, but the sheep stampeded away becaus
e sheep are smart enough not to trust anyone for anything, especially not people who sleep in and crawl out of sheds, and I couldn’t disagree with those sheep because I would run away from me, too, if I was a sheep and not me and even if I was me, I’d still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever.

  * * *

  I heard an engine behind me as I was walking down a road’s shoulder, so I stuck my arm out but when I turned around I was surprised to see a school bus; it hadn’t sounded that large. I pulled my arm in, stepped farther away from the road, thinking it wouldn’t be right to get a ride from a bus if it was full of kids, to expose young lives to me since I wasn’t yet convinced that I wasn’t a form of radiation. But the bus stopped and the driver cranked open the door.

  It’s not safe here. Get in.

  No, it’s okay. I should just wait on a regular car.

  Nah, nah, nah, get on in.

  Are you sure?

  I’ll just take you up the road where it’s safer. Can’t have you out here on this part of the road. Too dangerous. It’s not right.

  I found an open seat and a pigtailed girl leaned across the aisle to say, I’m ten, and I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said, I’m twenty-eight, not quite thinking.

  You’re not twenty-eight, a girl with red hair said, laughing as if I had claimed to be an elephant.

  I’m not?

  Noooo.

  How old do you think I am?

  A hundred, pigtails said.

  No, she’s not! She’s probably fifteen because my sister is sixteen and she’s bigger than her.

  What are you really? pigtails asked.

  I forget, I said.

  Where are you going? the redhead asked.

  I don’t know. To a farm somewhere.

  Are you a farmer?

  Sure, I said.

  Where’s your farm?

  I pointed south, or I think I pointed south, but I could have pointed west, or even north, and what would it matter? If you made enough turns it would take you to the same place. The girls in the back were chanting something and slapping their hands together with increasing speed and volume.